Tag Archives: SEO

Stanford’s Entrepreneurship Corner: Drew Houston, Dropbox

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Distribution

What is your distribution strategy? If you have only thought of traditional methods such as PR, AdWords and SEO for your startup so far, Dropbox Co-Founder Drew Houston gives some points to consider on the success of some of the “guerilla-style” successes the company had in their efforts to grow their user base in this interesting video from Stanford’s Entrepreneurship Corner. Hear how a “linkbait” video they made in their first year with viral video file names solved their distribution problem overnight!

Watch the video at Stanford’s Entrepreneurship Corner: Drew Houston, Dropbox via ecorner.stanford.edu

-Michelle Crawford, Lexity

Case Study: Using Contests To Build Links

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Regardless of how much you know about SEO (search engine optimization), it’s helpful to know that contest marketing can help improve the distribution of your site content — through the influx of back links, that is. In the case of a client, Debra—for LinkSpiel—praises the positive benefits of contest marketing for businesses who are entrenched in highly specific and highly populated markets (specifically where massive amounts of content can be found). She says, “[A] contest and the principle behind it will work for any industry, as long as you target a specific group and understand what motivates them. If you’re looking for a new twist or a fresh link building idea, consider hosting a contest. Everyone’s a winner if you do.”

But, how do you go about creating a contest?

To find out, check out Debra’s article, Case Study: Using Contests To Build Links.

-Christopher Lin, Lexity

LinkedIn is the Best Social Network for Improving SEO

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Short and sweet, being shared on LinkedIn improves the distribution of your site content. As Pam Dyer (Pamorama) notes, “According to an article on the SEOmoz blog, Zarrella compiled a database of 25,000+ URLs that had been shared at least once on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. The URLs were all at least one month old and had a minimum of one incoming link. The study found that, while Facebook and Twitter users share the most links to content, the number of links directed at that content is higher per share via LinkedIn.” With these facts in hand, it’s important to recognize that your business should already have a LinkedIn page. If not, go ahead and set one up. As you begin to think about your SEO (search engine optimization) strategy, prioritize sharing content through LinkedIn while never forgetting to also share content across Twitter, Facebook and of course, Google+. 

To read more about LinkedIn and how it can help your distribution, head over to Dyer’s article, LinkedIn is the Best Social Network for Improving SEO. 

-Christopher Lin, Lexity

How to Optimize Content When You Don’t Know Jack about SEO

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This post’s intended for the small business owners who are just beginning to master the art of SEO (search engine optimization)—and for those who may not even know where to begin. As opposed to giving you a laundry list of things to do to improve the distribution of your site content, it’s the most important to just know where to start.

The main goal underlying SEO is to have your site “found” by users entering a specific search query. Here’s an example: say, you sell flowers. In terms of SEO, the main objective, then, is to be “found” by users who type the phrase “sells flowers” into a search engine. Sounds easy enough. But, it gets a little more complicated when others sell flowers online as well. To filter the thousands (perhaps hundreds of thousands) of online flower shops, then, search engines rank each website based on its relevance to the search query at hand — i.e. how relevant is your store to the query, “sells flowers.” How do they do this? They crawl your site for relevant keywords and content. No matter how fancy your site looks, the written word (keywords) dominates the realms of search engine rankings.

So, say you want to increase traffic to your site based on the relative popularity of a specific keyword (or set of keywords). How do you determine how popular some keywords are, as opposed to others? ”You can consult the free Google Adwords Keyword Tool to get some insights. Type in a potential keyword and the site tells you how many people are searching for it in a given month and how much competition there is, based on advertising spend for sponsored links” (Kevin Cain, Content Marketing Institute). In a very simple explanation, using relevant keywords matched with their popularity can (but doesn’t always) improve the distribution of your site content across search engine results pages.

To learn more about SEO and how to improve the distribution of your site, read Kevin Cain’s knowledgeable article, How to Optimize Content When You Don’t Know Jack about SEO.

-Christopher Lin, Lexity

11 Things You Didn’t Know About Yelp

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Aside from using high ranking keywords in your content or adding rich snippets* to your site, great distribution of your site content (and thus, great SEO) can come from great customer service. Regardless of whether or not you understand how search engine optimization works—after all, it can sometimes sound like a foreign language!—higher rankings across search engines oftentimes result from better reviews. And better reviews on sites like Yelp come from better customer service. Todd Wasserman (Mashable) says, ”Yelp’s research has found that a customer whose review praises “customer service” is more than five times as likely to give a 5-star review than a 1-star review. Similarly, nearly 70% of those who trash a business’ customer service wind up giving a 1-star review.” And those “stars” can greatly affect whether or not your site rises to the top of a search engine results page (SERP). Instead of fretting over cracking the mysteries of SEO and search engine rankings, focusing your energies on delivering great customer service can deliver even more promising results. 

You don’t need to be a technological genius to improve the distribution of your site on search engines like Google or Bing. First things first, you just need to be friendly!

To read more about Yelp and how it can affect the distribution of your site content, head over to Todd Wasserman’s article for Mashable, 11 Things You Didn’t Know About Yelp.

-Christopher Lin, Lexity

*Note: Don’t worry if you don’t know what “rich snippets” mean.

SEO: Identifying the Impact of a Site Redesign

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A site redesign—no matter how fancy it looks—can oftentimes negatively affect the distribution of your site content from a search engine perspective if SEO (search engine optimization) is not considered throughout the design process itself. All your efforts at improving SEO? Wiped away. In order to redesign your site, and not affect its organic search traffic, “critical areas of change” like URLs and navigation options* should be discussed between SEO, design and development. In layman’s terms, changes to URLs and navigation options should be crawled during the development phase itself — SEO should not be sacrificed for redesign purposes. Here’s another example of how important SEO is to the redesign process: a redesign that increases its use of images (instead of text) should still “display as plain HTML text and links when JavaScript, CSS and cookies are disabled to ensure optimal crawlability for search engine crawlers.”

To read more, visit Jill Kocher’s article for practicalecommerce, SEO: Identifying the Impact of a Site Redesign. 

-Christopher Lin, Lexity

*Navigation options: when you scroll over a tab/category, and more options emerge after a click, i.e. through a drop down menu.

SEO for Ecommerce – How to Train for the SEO Games

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To improve the distribution of you site content, you need to first understand how SEO (search engine optimization) works—and how it should work for your small business. Even better than that, though, is when you can learn about SEO through pictures rather than words. Just see what Volusion has come up with:

Pole Vaulting Image of SEO

Click the image to see the Volusion infographic in full.

To read (and see) more about Volusion’s infographic, visit their blog article, SEO for Ecommerce — How to Train for the SEO Games. 

-Christopher Lin, Lexity

 

5 SEO Shortcuts to Avoid

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Effective distribution of site content requires an understanding of what not to do, as much as it does what to do. Jill Kocher (practicalecommerce) provides the following tips: “Ecommerce sites often depend upon product descriptions created by the manufacturer. However, when many sites sell products from the same manufacturer, those product descriptions become an engrained source of duplicate content. To be clear, stock descriptions will not incur a penalty. At the same time, search engines reward unique content. Nothing is less unique than a product description used by thousands of sites. Options include rewriting stock descriptions to be unique, or engaging customers to rate and review products to contribute their own unique content to the product pages.”

To read more, visit Kocher’s blog post, 5 SEO Shortcuts to Avoid.

-Christopher Lin, Lexity

4 Simple Visuals to Explain SEO

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The key to distributing your site content comes with the importance of keywords and a simple acronym—SEO (search engine optimization)—ensuring that your site ranks highly across all search engines. But, let’s be honest with ourselves, we’ve all been confused by SEO at one point. In order to make the term, SEO, easier to understand, Jill Kocher (ecommerce expert at practicalecommerce) provides four visuals to describe the process by which a site’s content is crawled by search engines (i.e. the process by which Google, and others, decides whether your site is worthy of rank #3 or #541).

As a simple explanation, keyword prominence is most important. Your site, regardless of how visually stunning it might be, needs to include highly relevant phrases (the phrases that are most searched by your preferred customers/audience) in highly relevant places like the “title tag” or “meta description.” “Using a keyword phrase at the beginning of the title tag is more prominent to search engines than using it at the end of the body copy, which in turn is more prominent than using the keyword in an image’s alternative attribute.”

To read (and see) more, visit Jill Kocher’s blog post, 4 Simple Visuals to Explain SEO.

-Christopher Lin, Lexity

Four SEO Tips for Ecommerce Category Pages

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Category pages must be “search engine optimized” in order to acquire customers who are not explicitly searching for your online store. By focusing on SEO when developing your category pages, you improve the chances of your online store’s content being distributed efficiently and optimally. “Shoppers are searchers, especially new shoppers. If Searcher A needs running shoes but has never heard of your sporting goods store, chances are they aren’t searching for your store’s name.” Simon Habtemariam provides the following tip: ”By linking to products as well as related categories in your category descriptions, you’re promoting cross-sells while simultaneously targeting long-tail and short-tail keywords”—long-tail keywords for specific shoppers (those looking for a specific product) and short-tail keywords for general shoppers (those searching online for a general product category).

To read 3 more SEO tips for writing category pages, head over to Simon Habtemariam’s article, Four SEO Tips for Ecommerce Category Pages.

-Christopher Lin, Lexity